True story: A young seminary instructor was discussing the nature of evil in his class when a woman raised her hand and told him she did not believe in evil. “Really?” he said. “What do you call Auschwitz?” The student replied, “Well, it’s evil for me.” The insulated arrogance of…
The only way to describe playwright August Wilson’s Seven Guitars is with superlatives: Wilson’s writing is inspired, and Israel Hicks’s casting and direction is nothing short of brilliant. The night I saw the show, it received a standing ovation from an audience that seemed floored and fascinated–and distinctly grateful for…
It may seem intriguing at first, but self-indulgent craziness gets old fast. That’s the problem with Don Nigro’s Seascape With Sharks and Dancer–it starts out well, but because the main creature is so sunk in self-pity, she doesn’t evolve. Such a failure to change may be true to life, but…
Eleanor of Aquitaine was arguably the greatest woman of the late medieval period. She was beautiful and brilliant, a patron of the arts and a cultivator of the chivalric code. She defied the church hierarchy, married a French king and dumped him for an English king, bore six daughters and…
When that broken-down, opera-sized chandelier lying on the stage flies out over the audience and up to the ceiling in The Phantom of the Opera, it’s enough to justify the price of admission. The special effects in the Broadway road show of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s extravaganza, now at the Buell…
Don Becker is a manic-depressive guy “with psychotic features” who writes humorous stuff for a living–first as a stand-up comic, now as one of Denver’s most irreverent playwrights. His first play, Back on a Limb, was a one-man show, an expose of his own mad life. Becker hid nothing of…
It’s always Armageddon for somebody. Don Becker’s dark new comedy, Kurt Cobain Was Right, puts a new spin on modern end-of-the-world themes harking all the way back to the Theater of the Absurd and cinematic spinoffs like Dr. Strangelove. The Lida Project’s outrageous production will offend, stimulate and maybe shake…
So much of the best musical comedy to favor the region recently has come from Boulder Dinner Theatre that it’s no surprise that BDT’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot is just what it should be–magical. This isn’t Lerner and Loewe’s best work (that distinction belongs to My Fair Lady),…
The central symbol of a long-lasting marriage in Jan de Hartog’s bittersweet The Four Poster is the marriage bed itself. Sexual tension is important in this poignant comedy from the Nomad Players, but the real point is a couple’s attempts to reach each other over 35 years. Well-written and charming,…
Heritage Square’s Music Hall’s comic melodramas may not appeal to everyone, but their pleasant buffoonery is a hit with audiences willing to put up with a little foolishness. The goony style of these frolics can’t really be confused with acting, but the company has achieved an undeniable polish. And its…
“Marley was dead to begin with.” Charles Dickens opened A Christmas Carol, his greatest ghost story and arguably the best secular Christmas tale ever written, with these strange, portentous words. In 150 years, the incredible success of the novella about old Scrooge and his ghostly redeemers continues to haunt the…
The arts and the sciences came together in the Renaissance in a way they never had before. Aristotle’s limited universe, in which the sun and planets revolved around the Earth, was discarded in favor of Copernicus’s more accurate assessment. And it was clearly seen by educated men and women that…
‘Tis the season for gooey sentiments, so you’d better watch out if you’re headed for the New Denver Civic’s gangly rendition of Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women. But there’s no need to pout: The real thing is out there in theaterland this holiday season, if you know where to…
Mama Rose is the stage mother from hell. The central character of Gypsy–now in a hardy production at the Arvada Center–might have been written up by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in his classic case studies of evil. Apparently nobody in the late 1950s (when the show premiered) understood child abuse,…
So many words, so few ideas. In his tedious satire Was He Anyone?, playwright N.F. Simpson tries so hard to bite into the red tape surrounding governmental “charity” that he chokes on it. Not even the Hunger Artists Ensemble’s talented cast can do more than give this sociopolitical spoof a…
Life in Southern California is, yes, phony and flaky. Once in a while a movie or a play celebrates all that peculiar sunny fakery with affectionate parody (Steve Martin’s L.A. Story comes to mind) or abject pessimism (Sam Shepard’s anti-Hollywood plays). And now there’s one more take on the L.A…
Sex is easy; love is hard. That’s the point, no matter how fractured, of Theatre on Broadway’s 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter’s Night, a story that sets out to demonstrate just how difficult it is to make emotional connections these days. It’s peopled with gay characters,…
Vulgar, irreverent and awash in cheap shots, Nunsense may be the silliest show in town. But despite its bad habits, this bit of fluff has one redeeming feature: The music is actually pretty darn good. Of course, it takes enormous energy to sell the songs here, which comment on everything…
Feminists are frequently accused of being humorless: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One–and that isn’t funny.” But at least one troupe in town is proving there are laughs to be had among the little womyn. Unidentified Female Objects II: The Search Continues, at the…
Think of Edvard Munch’s eerie painting “The Scream” and you get a pretty good idea of how Stephen Mallatratt’s play The Woman in Black affects an audience. Ad Hoc Theatre’s intense, ingenious production of Mallatratt’s ghost story is truly creepy. No monsters leap out at you, but the central figure…
From the beginning of Stephen Sondheim’s tragic musical romance Passion, we realize there’s something screwy about the notion of “love” promoted in this kinky tale. It’s a sort of Fatal Attraction meets Beauty and the Beast–but without the tidy ending of either of those popular works. Throughout the disappointing first…
The most important thing Bruce Friel does in his latest play, Molly Sweeney, is expose the double-edged nature of so-called medical miracles. If he’d have thought more deeply about the subject, he might have made a genuine work of art. As it is, he has written an absorbing piece of…
